Conclusion

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The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid leaves us with mixed feelings. To explain this we first take a closer look at the performance values. When performing sequential writes you can see that there is a very fast fast SSD. In this case it looks like only the SSD is being used which explains the very good performance. When it comes to sequential reads we first see the influence of the HDD which drags the results down. With the random writes we see that the smaller the block size the bigger the influence of the HDD is. The same phenomenom we see when testing random reads, except it's even more present. When running a 4K random read test the performance is comparable to a single 120 Gigabyte SandForce SF-2281 based drive, which meas that the hard drive compensates the performance of one SSD.

During the tests there were two other things we observed. As we opened the task manager during a benchmark run we saw that the CPU load was jumping between 30 and 60 percent. Keeping in mind that our test system isn't an old crappy machine this is some serious load which in the end costs additional money because the power that is needed to run the CPU between 30 to 60 percent. You might have noticed that our test system is equipped with an Intel Core i5-2500K which isn't slow. So you can imagine how high the load will be on a system with dual core CPU.
The other thing we noticed occured during the benchmarks. No less than four times we had the issue that the system forze druing the benchmark. We've never had this problem with any other product before. Once the computer is forzen you're forced to make a hard reset. Once you do this the Dataplex software is going to check the drive. When it's finished we got the message that the caching device cannot be found anymore. This leaves you with no other choice than reinstalling Windows 7.

Recommending this product is definitely not an easy task. At the moment there is nothing that is particularly great. Sure, the performance is on a highly competitive level but on the other hand there is the high load the software causes, which under certain circumstances bears the consequence that the CPU becomes a bottleneck. Furthermore there are the were the issues we saw when you have to hard reset your system. Regarding this we're talking to OCZ and hopefully we can post a statement on this matter at this point.

Last but not least there is the price: at the moment you'll have to pay CHF 469.- (est. EUR 391.-) for the RevoDrive Hybrid.

We give this drive sufficient zwei out of five stars.